I finally followed up on one of my earlier action items and got me a Dutch book about Neuro-Linguistic Programming (I don’t think it’s available in English). I’m not even halfway yet, but I must admit, it is a very interesting read.
As a disclaimer, I would like to point out one of the things about NLP. It is still very much in motion; things are added and discarded based on their merit. Many aspects are also open for interpretation. So anything I write here, is how I understood what the authors wrote of their understanding of NLP (but they seem to know their stuff very well).
NLP is based around a few corner stones, one is modelling of experts, in whatever discipline you want to extend your ability. The second is communication techniques, and the third, which I will be talking about in this post, is the subjective interpretation of reality.
Every person has their own way of viewing reality (if, in fact, “reality” even exists). Through our senses and nerve system, every one filters what they experience in a different way. The same event might lead to different conclusions for different people. One might think an accident is an opportunity to discover new and different things, another feels his life is over. We each have our own view on reality, our own model of the world, that we use to interpret new events. There’s some more information here. In this context Steve Pavlina’s writings on subjective reality are also worth pursuing.
Discovering another persons model allows one to better understand him and matching that model allows you to have more profound and improved communication. The “meta model” defines ways to extract this knowledge. This can be done by deceptively simple questions (“who?” “what?”, usually not “why?”), yet they can lead to profound insight.
Interesting stuff to learn and apply.
On a side note, I’ve been looking for some good NLP websites, but they all seem to be infected by the commercial virus. Lots of references to paid books and programs, but not much to real knowledge. NLP is pretty commercialized and there is a pretty ugly side to it … just so you know.